Meditation people talk about dissolving the sense of self, but often try to push it away. A better approach is to accept the sense of self and make it explicit in awareness with as much clarity as possible. Then it is no longer who you are, but instead, what is being observed.
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I tend to find that most often it's not even that. Instead, it's just not there.
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You being glib, m8?
If there isn't a sense of self, how do you locate it?
You just locate something that feels like it's in the center.
Typically, that means you've shifted your vantage to something that is now "the center", until you try to look at it and shift it again...
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Not existing as a discreet experiential object ≠ not having the illusion of such floating around in your general perception of the world
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For sure, that is kind of what I am getting at with more subtle senses of the self.
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See, I'd argue at this point you're more talking about a world model.
I've had full disintegration of the sense of self. Nothing there, anywhere. Was pretty shocking.
Still, I have a tendency to get absorbed in "selfing". It isn't the same thing. Is certainly not enlightenment.
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And for the habit of perceiving things that way to form, if it ever does. I don't go around persistently feeling like that.
When I do, it's starkly different from my "normal" experience of the world.
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For sure. I think part of the spiritual path is noticing no-self in many different life situations, so that it reaches into many different parts of our psychology. And then there is the stability issue. Being able to maintain consistency over time.
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1; I've had the good fortune to experience meditating in dreamless sleep (namely, Old School Buddhist form jhānas), which highlights that my sense of waking selfhood is just that — a sense. It's something that's generated and contingent and "booted up."
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No-self is a world of no boundaries.
You get the weirdest perceptual "glitches", self comes and goes (and is noticed as being just sensations), perspective constantly bounces...
Normie perception feels more solid, "grounded" while simultaneously abstracted, filtered, alienated.
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If I'm no-selfing, a distant staircase often just looks like a flat painting or something, has no depth because my eyes can't actually see any.
Then it comes closer and the entire thing unfolds in front of me, like an inflatable toy.
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yeah, I wonder. I just don't find a self anywhere. It feels normal and even kind of boring to me. Almost disappointing. "Oh, this is it?"
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